Cimitero Militare Polacco

On the slope below Loreto's basilica, 1,112 graves of the 2nd Polish Corps honour soldiers who died in 1944 for Ancona, Loreto, the Metauro and the Gothic Line. Terraced like an amphitheatre facing the sea, the cemetery is one of Italy's four Polish war necropoleis near the Scala Santa.

Why it matters

Loreto's fame rests on a medieval shrine, but the hill's twentieth-century history is written just as sharply on this hillside. In the summer of 1944 the 2nd Polish Corps of General Władysław Anders fought up the Adriatic side of the Italian campaign, taking part in the battles that freed Loreto and Ancona. The soldiers who fell there were buried at the foot of the basilica they had helped to save, in ground chosen so the dead would rest within sight of the sanctuary they had defended. The Shrines of Europe association, which groups Europe's great Marian shrines, records that the Polish troops also saved the basilica itself from fire after a bombardment, an episode commemorated in one of the building's stained-glass windows. The cemetery is a national memorial and a record of how the war crossed this landscape.

What to notice

The cemetery's graves stand in regular rows on three terraces that step down the slope, an arrangement the memorial foundation describes as giving the dead the formation they kept in life, with the sea and Ancona beyond. At the centre rises a flagpole carrying the Polish flag, its stone base inscribed on four sides with the names of the battlefields — Ancona, Loreto, Metauro, Gothic Line. On the altar stands a copy of the image of the Madonna of the Gate of Dawn of Vilnius, chosen because so many of Anders's soldiers came from Poland's pre-war eastern lands; nearby are the bas-relief of the Virtuti Militari cross, Poland's highest decoration for valour, and the insignia of the 2nd Corps. The grave markers reflect the diversity of an army raised from deportees: Catholics lie here alongside Orthodox, Jewish and evangelical soldiers, and at least one Muslim.

Context and history

The corps buried here had travelled an extraordinary road. The municipal portal records that it formed from roughly 160,000 Polish prisoners released from the former Soviet Union, who made their way through Persia and Palestine before joining the British Eighth Army in Italy. After the fighting that freed Loreto in 1944, the decision was taken to gather the dead of the Adriatic front at Loreto itself; the memorial foundation dates the cemetery's construction to 1944 on this hillside below the basilica, directed by the engineer Roman Wajda, with consecration on 6 May 1946. It lists 1,081 soldiers of the 2nd Corps fallen on that front, while the municipal portal and the Shrines of Europe association give 1,112 officers and soldiers including attached units — a difference in counting that does not change the scale of the loss. Anders himself, who died in London in 1970, is commemorated here in name and story rather than by burial.